423: “Away”

KMO welcomes David Chameides to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about his efforts to effectively communicate the implications of peak oil and climate change to teenagers. Dave has delivered this message to the students at the North Carolina Governor’s School, a summer program for high-achieving students, for the past six years. He sees this as an opportunity to shape the worldviews of future leaders before the obligations of adulthood make many of their lifestyle choices for them. After the conversation, KMO concludes with some comments about the dysfunctional tendency of left-leaning intellectuals to form circular firing squads and fight with one another over trivial differences in ideology rather than looking for common ground upon which to build alliances and coalitions.

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3 comments to 423: “Away”

A big criticism of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was that it lays out this really enormous problem that we have to deal with and then when it comes to the solutions section he talks about compact fluorescent light bulbs.
The disconnect between the magnitude of the challenge and the triviality of the proposed solution is a contributing factor to people checking out and feeling that they have no input or no control – there’s not a lot of point in them knocking themselves out to do anything about this enormous problem.

My reply:

Great summary. An even worse problem with that silly film is there was no mention that Mr. Gore had an important job between 1993 and 2001 where he was in a unique position to do something about it. In the film he expressed regret that his family grew tobacco and his sister died of a tobacco related illness. There was no mention of regret that he helped make the climate and energy crises worse while he was Vice President of the United States. Incinerators. NAFTA. WTO / GATT. Abolition of food safety laws. More food irradiation regulations. Genetically tampered food. Cutting Amtrak and increasing highway funding. To name a few things …

Also, it’s not just the mainstream media that doesn’t want to mention Peak Anything, most of the foundation funded “left” and “environmental” groups are allergic to discussing limits to growth on a finite planet, one of the reasons it’s been a long time since I’ve considered myself a leftist. There’s places I agree with them, places I don’t, but admitting the Earth is round and therefore finite doesn’t find much resonance with any political ideology.